Mastodawn

Tired: Organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful.

Wired: Owning the web and middle-manning every interaction in the world, thus maximizing ad revenue.

Inspired: Using ML to middleman the whole idea of knowledge into an unreliable stochastic word-slurry so people need to quadruple-check every piece of information they ever want or need by clicking around to dozens of other sources, thus maximizing ad revenue.

Tyrone Slothrop Jun 17, 2023

@mhoye On the upside, maybe the universal spread of machine-generated bullshit will finally drive people to develop a healthy mistrust in everything they read.

Tyrone Slothrop Jun 17, 2023

@mhoye I’ve read that in the late Middle Ages (in Europe), before writing or print became widespread, a witnesse’s testimony in court counted for more than a written record.

If you had a piece of parchment saying that a field belonged to you; and John had three witnesses saying that it belonged to him; then the court would rule in John’s favour.

Maybe we’re seeing the dominance of the written word being broken right now.

@krisnelson Jun 17, 2023

@slothrop @mhoye Interesting idea! I think you’re on to something here. I’d say it was all about trust and long-term relationships then, which regular people esp didn’t generally have with the written word on the European medieval world. It often worked well, except when it didn’t—and disfavored people the little group didn’t like could readily pay the price—eg, if everyone believes you’re a thief, who cares if you actually stole anything this time? Etc.

mhoye Jun 17, 2023

@slothrop maybe. I think that it’s more likely that we’re going to see a rise in chain-of-custody attestation as a widespread practice where veracity matters. I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like

<p origin=“site” signed=“hashval-thing”>Some verifiable claim</p>

… in documenta that will amount to an origin check where people need some sort of verifiable vote of confidence. We already see that with video in court, so maybe documents will follow suit once the tooling emerges.

graydon Jun 17, 2023

@mhoye @slothrop Yeah provenance is totally useful metadata to standardize but it comes strictly after standardizing systems for identity and authentication otherwise everyone just lies about where their data is from. There's a lot of missing infrastructure to build.

mhoye Jun 17, 2023

@graydon @slothrop I feel like we can either enjoy the full Build Out The Entire CA Ecosystem Again Oh God Oh God experience or we could just figure out how to leverage or build on top of it somehow.

graydon Jun 17, 2023

@mhoye @slothrop I'm 100% in the Rebuild The Whole Thing camp when it comes to the web. We can keep the old one for what its good at (and legacy content) but we need a new one for everything else.

graydon Jun 17, 2023

@mhoye @slothrop A short list of persistent glaring deficiencies in the web that need complete bottom-up redesigns and reimplementations for A Credible Global Information System: identity, authorization and authentication; provenance, confidentiality and integrity metadata; consistency, transactions and correct caching; incremental replication and backup; incremental view maintenance for derived data; a concise declarative language for queries and derived data; integrated version control; integrated payment, subscription and commissions; a canonical and efficient data model for nested-relational typed data rather than "documents"; stateful non-trivially-hijacked client-server sessions; a single stable UI language that's not mixed with a magazine-typography and videogame-multimedia arbitrary-content presentation layer.

graydon Jun 17, 2023

@mhoye @slothrop Perhaps the most dangerous deficiency is how it's robbed our imagination in this space. Its message of permanent and irresistible incumbency. We have come to believe that there can never be an alternative because it'd need to replace and operate at the same scale and with the same sort of vast economy-reshaping investment and set of players as the web got. That's not true. The web happened concurrently with the public discovery of the internet but wasn't the point of it. It just came along for the ride.

graydon Jun 17, 2023

@mhoye @slothrop One way to shake this conviction is to notice how the implementation of many critical apps on the average user's phone either avoids or isn't tied to the web stack in any but the most superficial/legacy/least-effort ways. WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal/etc, Gmail/Outlook, Skype, Spotify/Music/Podcasts/Audible, Netflix/Hulu/YouTube, Maps, Venmo/Cash/Banking, Weather, Photos, Gaming.

graydon Jun 17, 2023

@mhoye @slothrop If you removed the internet from the picture they'd be functionally inert. Removed the web? Hyperlinking between things and finding a spicy Reddit comment about the thing gets harder but it mostly all still works. You swap out the dingus you use to make an RPC with. Your backend team might have done that to you already to go faster.

Fabrice Desré Jun 17, 2023

@graydon @mhoye @slothrop this is mostly due to the lock in of iOS/Android and their appstore centric model. Notice how most of these apps work fine on the desktop web.

mhoye Jun 17, 2023

@graydon @slothrop Yeah, I think that it's important to remember how much of the old Web was bought up and acquihired specifically so that it could be centralized and then killed. None of that was accidental.

Min Headroom Jun 18, 2023

@mhoye @slothrop

Is it just me or are you describing an actual live scenario where blockchain would be useful?

Edit: I suppose you don't really need a chain for this so much as a cert authority and infrastructure. But the idea of arguments constructed with verifiable sources is interesting.

mhoye Jun 18, 2023

@rx1f @slothrop If it the goal of the exercise is to make participation more and more expensive with every subsequent argument until only ultra-wealthy people with dedicated warehouses full of coal-burning computation strata can make or assess claims of fact then yeah, a blockchain would definitely be the right choice.

Min Headroom Jun 18, 2023

@mhoye @slothrop IIUC (highly questionable) the painful part of crypto is the mining, not the signing.

@krisnelson Jun 17, 2023

@slothrop @mhoye key to this is “healthy” distrust—bad things can happen if everyone has an unhealthy distrust of everything they read—it becomes a different kind of gullibility making so many cons & scams easier

Spark Purcell (they/them)Jun 17, 2023

@slothrop @mhoye or better yet,a deep mistrust of anything containing or leading to "ad revenue"... the world would be much better off without ads.

Bruce Elrick Jun 17, 2023

@mhoye Fired: co-operative social media.

synlogic Jun 17, 2023

@mhoye nailed it

Femme Malheureuse Jun 17, 2023

@mhoye This is in part how the economic crash of 2008 happened. Paper deeds and mortgages were severed from their transactional value as mortgages, allowing the transactions to be traded in networked systems as bundles of collateralized debt objects. The assumptions about the properties described in aggregate deeds may have shaped traders' opinions of risk but it didn't match the reality of increasing failures of the bundled mortgages.

We should have seen this coming. https://kaptur.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/featured-article-facing-foreclosure-dont-leave-squat

Featured Article: "Facing foreclosure? Don't leave. Squat."

Facing forclosure? Click here. Or call us at (800)964-4699 or (419) 259-7500 [Reproduced with permission.]Amy GoodmanWednesday, February 4, 2009

Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur

The Doctor Jun 17, 2023

@mhoye Goddamn.

As bad as Cyberpunk v3 was, I never, EVER thought the "AI software makes every last piece of data on the Net that isn't backed up with a piece of paper from ten years ago completed untrustworthy" thing would ever happen.

Andrew (Television Executive)Jun 17, 2023

@drwho @mhoye post truth era.

⛈️ Information ⛈️Jun 17, 2023

@ajroach42 @drwho @mhoye I can't help but look at American politics and point out we didn't need AI to scale that.

Andrew (Television Executive)Jun 17, 2023

@Elucidating @drwho @mhoye need? No.

But it's what we have.

Urban Jun 17, 2023

@drwho @[email protected] holy crap. Dead on...

Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🌮 🚀 🌗Jun 17, 2023

@drwho @mhoye I did, because that's the virus plot from Pat Cadigan's Synners, which I've only been bleating about for 30 years now. Guess what? Everything's fucked so corps can make a little money. Next up, Visual Mark gets his fucking brain sucked out and becomes Digital Mark.

Dustin Mitchell Jun 18, 2023

@mhoye "unreliable stochastic word slurry"

mozzribo Jun 18, 2023

I just fail to understand why ad blockers aren't used by literally everyone.

mhoye Jun 18, 2023

@illumniscate very few people know that they can change how their computers work, and for a lot of people - particularly people for whom their mobile devices are their primary computers - that’s very difficult to learn and sometimes impossible to actually do.

Joan Albright Jun 18, 2023

LukefromDC Jul 3, 2023

@mhoye Not if people block all ads with no whitelist